Ragout Recipes

We had guests over Tuesday evening from India. I wanted to impress them with the Indian cooking skills I learned from Baji (my husband Lulu's late grandmother). I made one of my favorite Indian curry dishes called korma. It's a spicy curry in which goat meat is slowly stewed in coconut milk.

The key to the dish is the freshness of the meat. I buy my goat meat from a local Indian specialty market. Goat meat is popular in Indian cuisine so there are always fresh, tender cuts available.

Goat korma with okra is a spicy Indian curry dish. We usually serve it when my husband Lulu's family comes over for dinner as the rest of his family isn't vegetarian. To the Western palate, goat meat and okra wouldn't be an obvious choice of ingredients but they're very complementary.

To certain people, goat meat can have a strong taste, but I find that the meat at my local Indian market tastes wonderful and is very tender. Okra has a bad reputation as well due to its texture once boiled. I personally love this dish and could eat it by the pound, dipping rotis (Indian flat bread) in the spicy gravy sauce. At the very least, it’s a dish that will broaden your horizons.

There is a meat stew dish in every culture. The version from Indian cuisine, called nihari, is one of my favorites. I made some over the weekend with lamb shanks and lamb sirloin (my favorite), but other red meats such as mutton, goat or beef can work well. The key is to use very tender meat parts. The traditional garnish is a mix of fried onions, fresh ginger, cilantro, mint, cilantro, green chiles, sliced lemons and white radish sticks. I served it with naans which is also the standard way to enjoy the dish.

Nihari, in Urdu, is derived from the word "nihar", which translates to "morning sunrinse". Originally, the stew was usually eaten in the morning after prayers. The spicy stew is very flavorful thanks to the use of bone marrow. Interestingly, this is what gives Vietnamese phở broth its body.

My husband's aunt, Phoopi, taught me how to make it, but I first heard of the dish when I met Abbi, Lulu's late grandfather. He was a savvy bridge player and we would play from time to time. He told me that back in the days in Hyderabad, India, he would invite his pals over for an all night bridge game. There would always be a large pot of nihari waiting for them the following morning at the end of their game. The nihari would simmer overnight, tenderizing the meat and thickening the gravy. Lulu's late grandmother, Baji, would finish the dish with bhaghar, which is the final red oil layer of ghee (clarified butter) commonly used in a lot of Indian dishes. Delicious!

Boeuf bourguignon is a traditional French meat dish that is fairly easy to prepare. All you need is a lot of patience because it takes a long time to cook for the beef to become tender and succulent. To help tenderize the meat, I added an unconventional meat tenderizer (papaya paste) to my version of this French classic. If you want to make your beef bourguignon more authentic, just omit this ingredient. I also didn't add pearl onions, as I added a combination of leeks, shallots and sliced onions to the dish instead. The usual root vegetables (carrots and turnips) are also part of the gastronomic experience.

For anyone who is a fan of Julia Child or has watched the recent movie of her life, Julia and Julia, boeuf bourguignon may seem like too much of a challenge to make at home. But it doesn't really have to be this way. I used a slow cooker to make controlling the heat during the cooking process a simple task. With this method you needn't worry about the pot overflowing while the stew simmers. It may look good in movies, but you don't want to have to clean up that mess!

I put the ingredients in the slow cooker on low before going to sleep, and woke up to the aroma of beef stew permeating every room of the house. For the meat eaters, it's an intoxicating scent; for the vegetarians in my house, not so much. So if you have a slow cooker, try making boeuf bourguignon at home. It's easier to make than it looks, and the results are so worth the effort. And make sure that when you serve the dish to your loved ones, you start the meal with the phrase immortalized by Julia Child, "Bon appétit!"

Korma is a spicy curried dish of braised meat, made with fried onion paste. My favorite meat for korma is goat. Goat meat is not very popular in Western cuisine but it's quite common in South Asian dishes. It has a very similar taste to lamb but is much more tender. This is one of Lulu's grandma's recipes. She taught it to my mother-in-law, who passed the recipe on to me.

Contrary to murgh makhani curry (butter chicken), the meat doesn't require marinating time but tastes best when prepared the day before. Korma is also a lighter version of butter chicken since it contains no cream.

Korma is usually served with naan (Indian round fluffy bread made of white flour), basmati rice or some roti (flat Indian wheat bread).